#pirtanauha

[hitodama89]

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to publish the finished version of that one pirtanauha I previously showed some sketches of. The pattern kept evolving a little bit even after those doodles and this is what the finished bookmark turned out to be like. I think the colors work really well together here!

[tiuhtaviuhta]

Made a super simple heddle out of cardboard - time to weave a belt!

[hannakaisavainio]

Skomvaer ribbon (pirtanauha), made during visiting Rost air in Lofoten, Norway in summer 2020.

[hitodama89]

Just a quick little update on how things are going! I was originally going to make just a text post, but what the heck, have this absolutely beautiful & professional pirtanauha planning sketch, too. =‘D 1-4 are what I was initially trying to nail down, but in the end I felt like that the pattern was too predictable for the person I’m making it as they like pretty wild designs, so that’s how 5 & 6 came to be.

But yeah, it has been about 10 days since my surgery. The wounds aren’t hurting 24/7 anymore, thank god, but the gall bladder area is still very sore. It doesn’t bother me all the time, but things like yawning, coughing or even breathing too deep are pure agony. I just really, really hope that the pain does eventually go away and I’m not left permanently like this.

Despite my situation I managed to finish the project I mentioned a little while ago in here. I did indeed do some half-assing to get it done on time, but honestly? That was even pretty fun. And now it’s done, which means that for the first time ever I will be posting a daily Christmas calendar during December! I didn’t make it just for the sake of it, but instead me and my mother have made calendars for each other for two years now and the art was drawn primarily for that. But I might as well publish it online, too! It will feature most of the pets my family members have had during my lifetime (there are a couple who were with us for just a very short time that didn’t fit into it, but what can you do). For the sake of surprise my mother’s calendar slots are in random order, but because you guys obviously don’t know our pet history that thoroughly haha, in the online version the pets will be in chronological order from oldest to newest.

Just a little reminder/warning/request before we’ll get into it though: I’m old as heaven and pet husbandry wasn’t quite what it is today in the ‘80s and ‘90s, which is why there will be some questionable pet choices like a solitary guinea pig and a goldfish. Please don’t be a dick about things that happened 20-30 years ago. Okay? Okay. The art itself will be happy little (slightly) chibified doodles, so let’s just enjoy them as a cute blast from the past! Or if you don’t want to see them (for any reason) you can always just blacklist the tag “hiton joulukalenteri 2020″.

[hitodama89]

Pirtanauha bracelet commissions are finally open! For a limited time you can get yours for only 6 €, which includes shipping. Check out more information on how everything works from here.

[hitodama89]

A couple of non-bracelet pirtanauha commissions I recently did! The first one is a bookmark and those I can do pretty much for the same price as the bracelets, as they require the same amount of materials and time. The second one on the other hand is... A guitar strap, a guitar sash? Well that thing you use to hold the guitar while playing. Thaaaat one I’m not really gonna replicate any time soon for multitude of reasons, the biggest ones being the ridiculous amount of time, materials and just SPACE making them takes (my apartment is too small for the job! =‘D). I’m also not quite satisfied with those leather parts (I’m... Not good at sewing.) or the way this is supposed to just be tied to the guitar. The person commissioning this one said it was enough for them, but I think it would require some other method of attachement to make it truly secure, but I haven’t figured out what the heck would actually work with this. So sorry @homonocturnus; you said at some point that you were interested in something like this, but my skills aren’t quite at the level required for this sort of job. ^^’

But all the smaller commission options are still very much open!

[hitodama89]

I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun making more pirtanauhas lately. These are all of the individual patterns I’ve created, but technically you could mix & match most of them freely, not to even mention having way more than just two different colors per strap. But these two colors were all I had while making these examples, and now I’ve used up even those.

Now the question is: would anyone be possibly interested in buying bracelets like these? The price would be somewhere around 6 € (I’d have to look into postal fees a bit before locking that up) and all of them would be custom made. I’m not taking actual orders yet, just asking if there would be any interest for something like this!

Also if you are interested, would you mind taking a look at this sheet here and telling me what colors would you like having in your bracelet? I can’t afford to buy all of the possible colors at once, so hearing what colors would be people’s top priority would be pretty helpful.

[hitodama89]

I’ve been a bit silent on my pirtanauha shenanigans lately. I’ve been doing stuff, but there’s not much to show, because most of that stuff has consisted of googling different yarns. Who on earth would’ve thought that it’s borderline impossible to find one brand that would be of proper thickness, have a workable color selection and not cost an arm and a leg per yarn ball?! Not me at least, but that’s how it indeed seems to be.

I ordered a couple of balls of one brand, but it turned out to be a little bit too thin to work perfectly. It wouldn’t be impossible to use that one, but then I found out that the company had JUST discontinued their black yarns. Like what the heck -- how do you even discontinue one of the most improtant colors completely? Aaand because of that, that brand is pretty much thrown out of the window.

So far I haven’t been able to find a good substitute, so I guess the project is on hold until I find something at least somewhat suitable.

[hitodama89]

I recently took a two-day course of making traditional Finnish pirtanauhas! The word doesn’t really translate directly, but basically it’s a certain method of making ribbons, straps, sashes and belts from yarn. (Here’s an article about it; it’s in Finnish, but the main thing anyway are the pretty pictures.) I really liked the method, but the course itself was one those “oh boy” -sort of experiences.

The course had two very big problems, the first one being that the teacher was way too good at what she was doing. She constantly used such a fancy vocabulary that half of us had no idea what she was even talking about, and she was certain that once she had shown us how to do something once, we would be able to instantly do the same ourselves. She also didn’t have any written instructions for us, apparently because everything was so easy so why bother, but fortunately there were some books about the subject she briefly showed us. After she had pretty much abandoned us to proceed on our own, we had no choice but to grab the books and try to learn what we actually needed to do from those. It worked, but hey, if we wanted to learn the thing from library books, we could’ve done it at home!

The other problem was related to money. I’ve been in many courses from kansalaisopisto throughout the years, and so far every course has followed one of two patterns: either the course fee covers everything you need, or you need to pay the course fee and then buy materials for your work separately. But this one, without announcing it clearly beforehand, had a really expensive extra cost: you had to also buy the equipment you use while making these things. It was basically the equivalent of a cooking course where you have to buy the stove and pans along the ingredients! The price tag of the whole thing rose waaaay higher than what I was comfortable with, but at that point the other options were basically to walk out or sit through the course without doing anything - and in both cases I would’ve needed to pay the course fee anyway.

So yeah, not a perfect course by any means. And as an extra reason to be annoyed, I just now learned that you can’t even make any pretty, complicated patterns with the pirta (the board thing these are made with) they sold us. Or I guess technically you can if you are skilled enough, but it requires jumping through extra hoops that wouldn’t be necessary with a different sort of pirta. So if I want to make more of these I have to get really dang creative or buy even more equipment. =‘D Hooray! Fuck.

[hitodama89]

Elsie spent days desperately looking for anyone who would be able to help Weary, but it was in vain. No Esk she met knew what should be done; some suggested trying to find a Wanderer, but the only ones who would've been able to get to the swamp were Seventh and Ikkit and neither of them was known to be exactly helpful. Finally exhausted Elsie crashed to the beach just outside her boundary. She wasn't alone though. The two Esk she met, Song and Poe, didn't know what to do either, but after some pondering they got an idea. Song dove to the ocean in order to find Xilladenanessfeali, an ancient Esk who would surely be able to tell what had happened to Weary. 

God how HARD creating art has been for this whole year. I have tried to milk motivation out of anything I’ve been able to think of, including making pirtanauhas and a ton of commission examples and Art Fight attacks, but even with them this has been such an uphill battle. For the last few weeks it has honestly felt like I’m currently losing the battle altogether. I have ideas and stories I’d want to tell, but the actual drawing process just feels like shit 99 % of the time. Taking a longer break could maybe help, but I don’t really dare to do that before I’ve crossed some things off from my to-do-list. At least there’s only one more part to this current Esk saga.

[hitodama89]

FINALLY we are getting somewhere! I wasn’t satisfied with either of the two timed pieces I drew (for different reasons) but I think these are more or less decent. But what the heck do I need these for, then? They will be used as commission examples. For already some years I’ve priced my commissions based on how long drawing them takes, buuuuut I’ve had the actual prices and examples stashed away and only available in Finnish anyway. Because of the pirtanauha shenanigans I set up a Ko-fi page for myself and thought that maybe now it was finally time to have the commission info more publicly available, too, as Ko-fi should make paying them really easy. However the examples I’ve previously used were already a bit outdated, so I decided it’s best to start by making some fresh examples. The actual full info will be written after I’ve done a few more different sorts of examples, but you can already get a taste of the price range from the captions of these art pieces.

I will be mainly offering some rather fast & cheap commissions, both because I think that’s where my market would realistically thinking be and because I am not that confident in my ability to stay consistent on larger and more expensive art pieces - and I think consistency and predictability are really important in commissions. Larger commissions can of course be discussed: 3 h per art piece is my normal limit, and cases that go over that will be considered on case-by-case basis. Buuuut me drawing things like this as a commission won’t be happening any time soon. =‘D (My apologies to the person who once asked me to do so, but... Nope.)

[hitodama89]

A week of silence on this blog, so what I have been up to? Being anxious for no actual reason, being horribly unproductive because of the anxiety, hating everything I touch because of the anxiety... All that good shit! =D My latest adventure has revolved around northern lights, so here’s a compilation of most of the ones I have drawn and then scrapped for the thing. Right now I’m planning to stick with the last one, but who knows how much I despise it tomorrow!

On other news I have also tested a shit ton of yarns for pirtanauha shenanigans only to realize that I hate them all except the very first one I ever tried. It’s the series with no black color in it, so I ended up ordering all the other colors from one store and another sort of black from another store. There were like 10 or so colors from the first store and they costed about 30 or so euros, and the black alone from the other store costed nearly 20 €, which is hilariously horrible. (I did order two balls of black and the price included shipping, but still; especially because the first store didn’t take a separate fee for shipping at all.) But at least that is going somewhere now.

I’ve also been planning quite a bit of stuff for both Esk and Vetehi universes, so there should be plenty of things to draw as soon as I just stop being miserable.

[hitodama89]

A couple random thoughts from today:

It seems like that I need to get the stupidly expensive Well-known Brand tm yarn if I want to get anywhere with my pirtanauha shenanigans. At this point I’d need to sell like a million bracelets if I’d ever want to even get the invested money back, but argh, making them is just so darn fun that I’m tempted to do it anyway! The good thing would be that that particular yarn is found in every store in Finland, so at least it would be easy to get. But the price of nearly 5 € per ball just makes me sweat with pain..!

Another painfully pricy thing I’ve had on my radar since last summer has been getting myself an electric kick scooter. They can nowadays be rented in the bigger cities of Finland, too, but that’s not an option in the bumfucknowhere town I live in. I finally did some research on the subject, and it seems like there’s literally one brand sold in Finland that’s made to be used by heavier-than-average people like me. And it’s made by... Some completely unknown Polish company. =‘D I could find literally one user review of the product, and although it was very favorable and talked specifically about the weight subject that’s one of my biggest worries, I would reeeeaally like to have a bit more info before investing 500 € to the thing.

Damn you money, why must you always be such an issue in my life!

[hannakaisavainio]

Rihmasto (Mycelium) 2018 Woven ribbons (pirtanauha), found wood pieces in Mooste village. Exhibited in Metsik (Wild) -symposium in Mooste, Estonia and Jäkäläfest (Lichen festival) in Mustarinda, Hyrynsalmi Finland.